The last one there might be the most crucial: if we want a greener economy to emerge from the Covid-19 crisis, better data infrastructure is key to private enterprise making more sustainable choices. As we discovered in our broader work, environmental data and software companies received the largest portion of equity funding in the UK, so this should be doable. All of our efforts to both avert the climate crisis and to rebuild the economy following the onset of the Covid-19 crisis are being hampered by poor data flows.

As the UK leaves the EU it must look to keep to a European standard on data – or even better it.  Finding a “goldilocks” zone of regulation – one that allows the right data to be shared while protecting data that needs to remain closed – will be difficult, yet vital.

Where should we start?

Some of the guiding principles to make this happen we know already: reduce the burden of information gathering and analysis by those requiring non-financial reporting data; reduce the burden of reporting from organisations across reporting frameworks, jurisdictions and scopes; unlock access to sensitive information by addressing legal, liability and consent management issues; and unlock access to non-sensitive information so that such access is commoditised.

What Project Cygnus recommends to get the right data infrastructure in place are the following:

1. Data must be usable by machines, not just humans. Policies must mandate that data be machine-readable in order that it may be collected and used in an efficient manner. Equally important is the ability to discover that the data exists, what it is, where it is from, and how it may be used. This ‘metadata’ is a priority to make available so that data may be found and information about it accessed. Policies must mandate the production of meta-data that will aid discovery.
2. The governments of the UK and Ireland should mandate the publishing of any non-sensitive data under an open license. This is essential to enable large-scale discovery of what data exists. Policies should also mandate the publishing of sensitive non-financial reporting data under a Shared Data infrastructure framework.  
3. Data increases in value the more it is connected, so maximum connectivity must be a goal. A focus on systemic cohesion and interoperability reduces the burden of sharing by creating common rules and frameworks for sharing that address good data governance. It ensures data is used appropriately for the purposes intended, addressing questions of security, liability and redress.

Any plan to make the economic recovery sustainable will require something to be done on data infrastructure. Our recommendations would make for a great start.

Get started now

On 20 January 2021, we will be hosting a workshop for senior-level staff and decision makers who are interested in accelerating their organisation’s path to net-zero. It will help you understand the impact of remote working, benchmark your organisation and leverage our data-sets to help you make more informed decisions. If you’re interested in joining, find more information here.

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We had speakers from across the political spectrum: Bim Afolami, Conservative MP for Hitchin and Harpenden; Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle Upon Tyne and Shadow Minister for Science, Research & Digital; Neasa Hourigan, TD for Dublin Central and Chair of Ireland’s Committee on Budgetary Oversight; Alan Brown, SNP MP for Kilmarnock and Loudoun and the SNP’s Westminster spokesperson on Transport, Energy and Infrastructure; Clive Lewis, Labour MP for Norwich South; and Tom Sasse, Associate Director at the Institute for Government.

Bim kicked things off outlining both the government and the Conservative party’s general position on green Covid-19 economic recovery. He pointed out that 2030, while it seems a long way away by some measures, is in fact very close at hand in terms of even the things the government wants to achieve by that date. Supporting nuclear energy is a big deal to this government; comforting to Project Cygnus as we are building one of our major policy announcements around this topic, it was recognised that retrofitting of existing housing stock is absolutely vital to green recovery.

Chi Onwurah starkly laid out the terrain: climate change is an existential crisis – and we are facing the biggest economic downturn in 300 years. She outlined Labour’s Green Recovery plan, which calls on the government to spend £300 billion and create 400,000 green jobs. Neasa Hourigan made the immediate point that one of the key ways that Ireland’s green Covid-19 response will be different from the UK’s is that Ireland is still part of the EU; the European Union is laying out a €750 billion Covid-19 recovery fund.

Alan Brown spoke to the local side of things, pointing out that in order for communities to be able to activate their own green Covid plans, the appropriate competencies need to be devolved to them. He also talked about the importance of Carbon Capture, particularly its role in NE Scotland. Clive Lewis said that a 2050 net zero target lacked ambition and needed to be brought forward. If democratic governments not markets led the way, we could even try for 2030.

Tom Sasse gave a non-partisan view. He said the new 10-point Tory plan gives some renewed hope of the government taking green Covid recovery seriously. In particular, the 2030 ban on petrol car sales was seen as suitably ambitious. Also, the link between the levelling up agenda and green recovery was applauded – it shows that the Tories are thinking about the green agenda in a jobs and business light as opposed to seeing it as something strictly to be costed.

It was a great event that highlighted the fact that Project Cygnus is on the right track. Retrofitting of homes and sustainable transportation, two flagship Cygnus polices, were brought up by the speakers repeatedly. It was a fitting final event for this phase of Project Cygnus. A recording of the event is available here.

If you’re interested in gaining access to our exclusive Project Cygnus data, insights, tools and apply it to your Covid-19 recovery planning, please join our workshop on 20 January 2021. It will help you understand the impact of remote working, benchmark your organisation and leverage our data-sets to help you make more informed decisions. Sign up here.

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Where the poll became interesting was in what people said when asked what they wanted post-Covid-19: 18% wish to work from home all of the time, 39% some of the time, 39% never. There has been a sharp increase in people wanting to work from home some of the time as compared to the pre-Covid-19 period; but most people want to be able to go to the office when necessary as well. For those predicting the death of the office, it looks likely that people are not ready to give up on it completely just yet.

Environmental implications

From an environmental perspective, having vastly more people working from home isn’t as beneficial as has sometimes been assumed. There are definite upsides – less people commuting into city and town centres is a big one. Although a lot of city and suburban dwellers tend to think of commuting as rail or metro, in Britain, 61% of people commute via car or van. So, less people commuting almost assuredly means less people driving. However, there are environmental downsides to more people working from home. Shared office space tends to be much more energy efficient than people working separately from home, particularly in winter.

There is also a growing worry that the effect of Covid-19 may actually drive up car usage, at least in the UK. A big red flag is that reluctance to use public transport is now higher than it has been for the last eighteen years. Although half of people across the UK are using their cars less than they did compared with last year, 57%, perceived access to a car as more important now than before the coronavirus pandemic. There is a reasonable worry that because of fear of Covid-19, people will use public transport less and their cars more in the coming years.

Homes are poorly insulated in the UK and the problem is equally severe in Ireland. Without an extensive programme of retrofitting in both countries, the increase in people working from home could conceivably begin to have a net negative impact on the environment, even if emissions from commuting come way down.

It is clear that working from home is not a silver bullet for solving the climate crisis; nor can we have any degree of certainty how much it will continue as the pandemic abates. We know rather that we have to be ready for either eventuality and design policy around a world that could see us working from our homes more or returning to the office.

Find out more

Next week, as part of London Climate Action Week 2020, we will be presenting the preliminary findings of our net-zero Covid-19 recovery programme, Project Cygnus, and exploring how local policy interventions can help local governments, cities and regions accelerate innovation and drive toward net-zero. Register for free here to join us on 16 November – we’d love to hear your feedback.

One, which policies had the most support across the political spectrum, with both centre-left and centre-right figures/organisations making arguments in favour. We came to the conclusion early on that even if a policy was seen as being beloved by large portions of the left but had no traction with any serious players on the right, then advancing the policy wasn’t practical. We will have a Conservative government in Britain for at least the next three and a half years for a start, as well as a grand coalition in Ireland, the two largest portions of which are centre-right.

Two, which of the policy solutions available had the greatest bang for buck, i.e. what could make the greatest difference for the least amount of expenditure. Particularly as we want these policies to work at a local level, we had to consider what could be rolled out without too much expense, at least in order to get things moving forward quickly. We need a green economic recovery to happen as efficiently as possible.

Three, which policies would work regardless of the work patterns during the Covid recovery and after. Given we have no real idea yet what people’s working lives are going to be like once this crisis has abated, there was no sense in making grand, sweeping assumptions. The solutions had to work whether people were going to be working from home much more in the future as well as if the office is set to make a roaring comeback.

Fourth and finally, and in many ways most importantly, we wanted to discover which policies would create jobs and otherwise allow the country to best economically recover from the still ongoing Covid crisis. While we want to make the economic recovery needed as green and local as possible, there still needs to be an actual economic recovery. We need policies that will hold up their end not just in terms of sustainability and being local, but also in regard to actually creating jobs and aiding other economic factors.

We are nearing the end of our search for policies to help aid a sustainable Covid recovery, having held an event on the topic last week. Our findings will be published at the end of the year. In the meantime, join us on Thursday, November 26th at 10:30 am when we will be talking to MPs and Teachta Dála (TDs) from across the political spectrum to discover what the political parties in the UK and Ireland are planning in terms of green Covid recovery. Sign up via Eventbrite here.

There was a lot of consensus around certain policy areas. One was the need for a vast retrofitting of houses to take place. This would be true even if a lot of people weren’t going to be working from home for the foreseeable future – with working away from the office in mind, retrofitting becomes all the more pressing.

There was a push from several panellists for the Westminster government to make it easier for the private sector to fill this gap instead of trying to do it all itself; that there were market forces that would work to make retrofitting on the scale needed possible. There was also a feeling that the mass increase in home working could act as a catalyst – a winter working in poorly insulated houses could push people to see the value in retrofitting in a directly personal manner.

Sustainable transport was another policy area people gravitated around. This meant different things to different speakers. For some, it was pushing electric vehicles out as quickly as possible; others pointed out that even if we could speed up EV production as much as possible, it still wouldn’t solve enough of the problem. Other items brought up were increasing walking and cycle infrastructure as well as electrified trains.

A radical idea backed by several speakers was the establishment of a National Climate Service – a sort of National Service for young people, built around the climate crisis exclusively. This would involve young people planting trees and other activities. The double bonus of such a scheme would be that it would have an immediate climate impact because of the work being done by the service, but also in that it would both engrain the importance of climate action in the minds of the young participants, leading to an even steeper generational change in terms of the importance of avoiding climate change, but also in linking environmentalism with patriotism in a way never before explored.

There were reminders of realism in the discussion as well. Green schemes that haven’t worked as planned in the past; how centralised the UK is in terms of governance, particularly England, making it difficult for local government to take the right steps to combat climate change. Also, how the Westminster government will be looking for ways to cut spending in the near future having bailed out so much of the economy during the crisis. We need to be vigilant in terms of the climate agenda slipping away during the Covid recovery.

Like after our first Project Cygnus event in September, it was great to see speakers from across the political spectrum argue about the specifics of how we deal with the climate crisis as opposed to whether or not such a crisis exists.

We are looking for more good ideas about how to make the economic recovery from Covid as green and sustainable as possible. If you have thoughts to share, please email them to partners@ib1.org.

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC), an independent non-departmental public body formed under the Climate Change Act of 2008 to advise not only the House of Commons but also the devolved parliaments of the nations on how best to tackle the climate crisis, is chaired by a Tory, Lord Deben. It has highlighted that current policy on buildings continues to lag behind what is needed. An emission reduction of up to 18% overall could be the result of an effective retrofitting of homes to make them more energy efficient – more than three quarters of the emissions in question are from domestic homes. The same conclusion that retrofitting of houses is crucial has been echoed by Onward, a centre-right think tank that produced a paper entitled Costing the Earth on the subject of tackling climate change, as well as the Green Alliance, who argue for scaling up the domestic supply chain for “deep retrofit” (costed at £300m) and investing an additional £1 billion of public capital every year which they calculate will mobilise a further £3.5 billion in private investment.

The Green Alliance also proposes Natural Infrastructure Schemes to create a market in avoided costs. These would, for example, reward land owners for activities that reduce flood risk, improve water quality and sequester carbon like planting trees and creating wetland habitats. There are calls for market-based solutions from all quarters, even from organisations traditionally seen as centre-left.

Meanwhile, a lot of the more ambitious proposals on reforestation are coming from the centre-right. Take the proposal for a “Forest of Britain”, a single, unbroken, two-mile wide line of protected natural habitats from John O’Groats to Land’s End, via the east of Wales. Or a Nature in the City Act, something which would contain a range of measures to protect declining species and enhance the built environment including implementing a programme of ‘rewilding’ of public green spaces, apportioning a certain area of each park to the stewardship of local schools or wildlife trusts and introducing payments to local authorities for the provision of environmental services. Both of these ideas came from Policy Exchange, perhaps the leading centre-right think tank in the UK.

With there being a consensus being reached between left and right on not only the need to tackle climate change but on a lot of the means of doing so, the path toward the most sustainable economic recovery from the Covid-19 crisis possible begins to come into focus.

For instance, CO2 concentrations will continue to rise, even in 2020: despite a 4-8% fall in global emissions since the start of the crisis, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is estimated to still increase this year. Carbon Dioxide is being emitted faster than natural sinks can absorb the carbon; in other words, the fall in emissions is too low to make a real difference. Take this comparison: the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere we would have expected to increase by 0.68% in 2020, compared to the 2019 global average. What is it projected to be this year with lockdown factored in? 0.60%. Looking at the figures, it becomes difficult to say that lockdown has actually been all that environmentally advantageous.

The truth is, fundamental requirements to achieve Net Zero are largely unchanged by the Covid-19 pandemic. We still need to make our homes way more energy efficient. We still need to find some way to reforest large parts of the countryside. We still need to transition away from petroleum-based fuels. Beyond the fact that the environmental impact of lockdown is not as great as reputed, shutting down great portions of society permanently was always going to be a poor solution to the climate crisis.

Having said all of that, there are lessons from lockdown that can be learned for environmentalists. Pre-crisis, commuting and business travel made up around a third of transport-related carbon emissions. While the impact of more people working at home isn’t wholly environmentally positive – a lot more energy is being consumed in homes, to take one big example of a negative impact of home-working on the environment – getting more people off the road has obviously been positive for the environment. Even if people do head back to the office in bigger numbers once the Covid-19 crisis is deemed to be at an end, whenever that might be, trying to limit the number of cars used in commuting would be advantageous. Pre-crisis, more than 50% of workers in Britain used a motor vehicle to commute, whereas only 4% cycled to work. Now that we have confirmed via experience that cutting down on commuting cars is positive, we can try and continue that trend.

Demonstrating that carbon emissions can come down if we actively try and cut them may be the lasting legacy of the lockdown from an environmental perspective. That in and of itself should be seen as a positive.

To drill down a little further, the impact thus far has fallen hardest on small to medium sized enterprises, and correspondingly, the owners and operators of smaller businesses and their employees.

Percentage of companies currently trading, paused trading or ceased trading as compared to the start of the Covid crisis:

Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/releases/coronavirusandtheeconomicimpactsontheuk24september2020

In terms of how this has impacted employment, overall the picture is misleadingly comforting for the UK. The unemployment rate countrywide is 4.1% as of July 2020, which is astonishingly low, all things considering . Yes, furlough would have helped keep this number lower than it might have been, but still, 4% is healthier than you might imagine. The figures are impressive, so long as you dig down only generally and nationwide: unemployment was 3.85% at the end of 2019, so the impact of Covid so far on total unemployment is only to increase it by 0.3%. 76.5% of all people between 16 and 64 in the UK are in employment, which is actually 0.4% higher than this time last year.

The problem here comes when you drill down by age. For 18 to 24 year olds, employment decreased by 146,000 in Q2 of 2020, a record decrease for this age group in a single quarter. Employment numbers by age group is steady for almost every group apart from those under 25. This has me worried that this generation of young people are bearing the brunt of the Covid crisis economic fallout without this even being widely known, never mind something being done to ameliorate the problem.

We need small businesses and young people to be at the forefront of reversing the economic crisis – and if we think about this in sustainability terms, it becomes even more important. It will be small businesses in emerging sectors who will be the innovators in terms of making sure the economic recovery from the Covid crisis is green and sustainable; that 18 to 24 year old demographic will be the ones who in the near future will have to lead the charge toward net zero in the decades ahead.

This is a big problem that isn’t being talked about enough. How can we affect a green Covid recovery that helps small businesses as well as getting more young people back into employment? Project Cygnus is looking at ways to bring this all together.

To start with, we’ll look at how the UK has managed to reduce the carbon emissions it physically produces by 39% over the last thirty years. Firstly, the reduction of coal usage over that period. Coal’s share of the UK’s total carbon emissions was 28% in 2012; by 2018, that had fallen to 5.5%. Secondly, the amount of energy efficiency improvements made over the last three decades, in particular more efficient household appliances combined with the phase out of incandescent lightbulbs. This has resulted in reduced emissions across several sectors, most notably, residential, business, energy and the public sector. Thirdly, mostly through subsidies, cleaner power has become much more prevalent. Energy from renewable sources was only 4.56% of the UK market in 2006; in 2019, this had jumped to 35.8%.

Yet there is a fourth and final macro reason that carbon emissions have fallen in the UK over the last thirty years, and it is perhaps the most important as well as being the simplest to explain. The United Kingdom makes far less stuff than it once did.

The sale of manufactured goods accounted for 16.7% of UK GDP in 1990; by 2019, that figure had fallen to 8.6%. The peak of carbon emissions created on UK soil was 1972, at which time manufacturing accounted for 28.1% of the UK’s GDP. In 1990, 15.7% of all jobs in the UK were manufacturing in nature; by 2019, that figure had fallen to 7.6%. What’s even more stark is that in 1981, 21.8% of all jobs in the UK were in manufacturing, demonstrating the long term nature of this trend. While there are other factors which account for the decline of carbon emissions being created in the UK, such as the three I described above, the decline of manufacturing over the period in question is key – particularly as it will affect how much of a carbon footprint the UK creates over the next decade as the country leaves the European Union. The UK has become an economy heavily focused on services, which means that it is importing a lot of its goods from elsewhere. Rather than actually eliminate its carbon footprint, the UK has taken it offshore.

Britain imports products that are carbon intensive that are made elsewhere to make up for the gap in terms of the country not producing what it wants/needs within its own territory. We can split this off with appropriate definitions for each of the two ways to evaluate carbon emissions: the territorial-based creation of carbon emissions, which is the amount of emission that originates on UK soil, created directly by sources in the United Kingdom; then we have the consumption-based measure of carbon emissions, which is includes the emissions from all imported goods as well. The UK imports around 200 million tonnes worth of extra-territorial carbon emissions each year – which takes the country’s total carbon emissions figure close to what the 1990 figure was, wiping out the impressive carbon cutting we’ve seen within the borders of the UK over the intervening period.

This is where the B-word needs to make an entrance. Leaving the European Union throws a lot of this in the air for the UK. One reason is because if the UK is going to start manufacturing more post-Brexit – and whether it will or will not is excessively unclear, even at this point, several months away from the end of the transition period – that will increase the territorial-based carbon footprint of the country unless steps are taken to avoid this. Which, given the fact that no one is clear on what will happen post-Brexit in the manufacturing sector in particular, is worrying. We could see a worst-case scenario arise, one in which the UK manufactures more, increasing carbon emissions, all while importing from countries with less than efficient greenhouse gas regulations, meaning the UK could be both creating more carbon emissions on home soil and importing from carbon intensive sources. In other words, we could see a rise in both territorial-based carbon emissions and consumption-based emissions at the same time.

All of this makes understanding the problems as well as potential solutions ever more crucial at this sensitive moment in which we not only have to think about economic recovery from the Covid crisis, but Brexit as well.

Judging by the UK government’s first announcement on how to make the economic recovery from Covid as green as possible, we may have to scale down our immediate expectations. On July 22nd, a joint announcement between Number 10, the Department for Transport and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy was made, laying out the government’s £350 million plan to “cut emissions in heavy industry and drive economic recovery from coronavirus” (GOV.UK). Upon investigation, there are several things wrong with the plan.

The first one is obvious and doesn’t require any further digging: £350 million is absolutely nothing. The Lib Dems have laid out a £150 billion green Covid recovery package, and while it is light on specific details, the overall figure is a lot closer to what it will take to get this moving in the right direction. A £350 million pound plan might as well be a zero pound plan in the grand scheme of things.

Worse than that, some of the specific items in the £350 million plan have a very Dominic Cummings vibe about them. For instance, £15 million of the project is dedicated to a “New National Space Innovation Programme” which will “monitor climate change across the globe” and will look to protect local areas from the impacts of extreme weather by identifying changes in the environment. Often the government’s green Covid recovery package has the feel of something played around with in Number 10 and then hastily chucked out; a Special Advisor’s toy to have fun with as opposed to a serious plan for reaching difficult emissions targets.

Trying to be positive about some aspects of the green recovery plan, there is a large chunk set aside for Carbon Capture and Storage that could lead to something positive in the coming years. There is also part of the £350 million set aside for construction tech, which given retrofitting houses to make them more energy efficient needs to be part of any UK green recovery plan, is welcome. The money in there for R&D around electric cars is comforting. Yet again, one has to come back to the paltry amounts we’re talking about here: £10 million for the construction tech and £10 million for electric cars R&D are simply not serious amounts of investment in either important area.

One can try and be as forgiving as possible here and say that the £350 million plan announced in July is simply the government’s starter for ten, and much more will be coming down the pipeline. They will do more thinking and put more resource towards this once the UK-EU trade negotiations are no longer in the way, surely. I can only hope that this is the case.

Given the range of guests, it was interesting to see how much agreement there was on key points. One item of consensus was around entrepreneurialism and how important it will be to a green Covid recovery; that the private sector will have to do a lot of the heavy lifting. More to the point, that SMEs will be of central importance – worrying when small and medium enterprises have been hardest by the crisis thus far. This partly fed from a suspicion that Whitehall wouldn’t be as helpful as it could be in this regard. In fact, the distrust of central government was a running theme, with the feeling from local government being that Westminster was both doing too little and not allowing local government to pick up the pieces either.

Looking at the local level, it was clear from the discussion that a lot of hard decisions will have to be made. An example was given around heaters outside of cafes as winter approaches – bad for the environment, but possibly necessary for businesses that can only hold so many customers inside. It will be decisions around things like this – the fine details – that may become vital, which is why making green Covid recovery as local as possible is so important.

So much is going on in the private sector on green Covid recovery. Procurement businesses are able to look at the carbon footprint of tenders. New Green banks were discussed. Yet there are concerns. We have no idea, for instance, if the changes to the way people are working since the start of the crisis are permanent or whether there will be more of a “return to normal” than we expect from the perspective of where we are at the moment. How people respond to the Covid crisis will have a lot to do with how successful any green Covid recovery can be – and at this stage, it is still difficult to know in any detail.

What is clear is that there is a lot going on in this space beyond Project Cygnus. Green Covid recovery is a subject many are seriously considering as the crisis looks to be going into its next phase.

We are looking for more good ideas about how to make the economic recovery from Covid as green and sustainable as possible. If you have thoughts to share, please contact us.